The Soviet Spy Museum and the last of the pictures of Tallinn.

 Today we visited the KGB Spy Museum in the Hotel Viru.

It is not all that long ago that the Iron Curtain was still in place here in Estonia and elsewhere, the most physical symbol being the Berlin Wall in Germany. I confess that I never knew that much about the Iron Curtain outside of what little attention I gave to it when I watched the television news and what I saw in movies. We were all thrilled when the Berlin Wall came down but how many of us knew that much about the other countries that had been under Soviet rule? The Iron Curtain lasted from 1945 to 1991. On the walking tour of Old Town our guide talked quite a lot about the more recent history of Estonia than the ancient times, about the bombing of the town during WWII and the soviet occupation afterwards.There were long lines for everything, the basic necessities, and you still might not get anything because it's all gone by the time you got there. How a lot of foods were rare in Estonia, like bananas, and it was almost a status symbol to have any, it meant you had connections in high places. There is even an exhibit called "There are no bananas" in Tallinn about the time of the Cold Ware and living behind the Iron Curtain . But you can  google it yourselves if you wish to learn more, this blog is not the best place to get a history lesson. 
Here is the KGB Spy Museum on the 23rd floor of the Hotel Viru:
 View from the 23rd floor.

"Hotel Viru"

 The red telephone was a direct line to the KGB head office in Estonia and the white telephone was very heavy because it was filled with metal so a bug couldn't be placed in it.

 Check out the letters on the keys.

 A rough translation of the sign on this door is "Nothing is here". It was an open secret that there were soviet spies on the 23rd floor. For one thing, there used to be a restaurant with big windows on the 22nd floor and you could see that there was a 23rd floor from there. When hotel guests would ask what was up there they were told that those were "technical" or engineering rooms, or they were literally told that there was "nothing there, nothing to see".

When all the KGB left they did it overnight and in a hurry. What they couldn't carry with them they smashed or destroyed. Here was the main room of their occupation.

 The phone is broken because the KGB took out the bug. The gas masks are there because they practiced evacuation in case of a gas attack. The stamp says "Approved" and you needed your papers stamped in order to work at the Hotel Viru.

 There is a transmitter in the green cuff links seen in the upper right. That's right, spies really did talk into their sleeves.

More views from the 23rd floor.

 Approximately 80 rooms and all the public areas in the hotel had listening devices, and the 80 rooms also had cameras in them. The history of the hotel is very interesting and some of it can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokos_Hotel_Viru
Since it was lunch time we decided to walk the few blocks to the Radisson Blu and go to their Sky Lounge, the guide and other folks had said the view was even more spectacular from there.